a strawberry shows half-drown'd in cream
by Pencilwalla
Summary: So when Viktor finds himself lurking in the bathroom in Hasetsu Ice Castle while Yuuri and Yurio are practicing, pinching his nipples to make them erect because he's tried literally everything else and also is kind of hungover, he is half-convinced the entire banquet was some kind of hallucination. What is he doing here? "Are you cold?" Yuuri blurts out. "You look...cold."


Viktor's list of patented and highly effective Seduction Tactics (TM), designed by him especially to lure in one Yuuri Katsuki, are as follows:

1\. Nudity

2\. Pretending to sleep while looking beautiful

3\. Good Dog

4\. Touching Yuuri's lips, and his hair, and his face, and his back, and his…

5\. Subtly implying that Viktor wants to sleep with him

6\. Playful teasing

7\. Less subtly implying Viktor wants to sleep with him

8\. Nipples

9\. Eros

10\. Best Dog

11\. Actually sleeping while looking less beautiful and more sad

12\. Katsudon? Eros

It's possible that Viktor is not actually good at seduction. It's possible that Viktor is a gay disaster who drunkenly called his parents to ask how to make boys like him and then had to talk them down from either coming down to Japan to beat Yuuri up or coming down to Japan to help him. Both of those options are terrible. Viktor loves his mothers but Maman could bench press Yuuri with one hand and Mamochka had once nearly burned down the house after an ill-advised attempt at a romantic candlelit dinner with her wife.

Yuuri is immune to nudity. Immune to Viktor's attempts to get close to him, physically and emotionally. He does not want to sleep with Viktor in any sense of the word. He does not seem to take Viktor's teasing in the spirit it is meant. He thinks pork cutlet bowls are the epitome of sex and he approaches this interpretation with all the intensity of baby Georgi trying to convince Yakov to let him to skate to My Immortal.

(At first Viktor thinks Good Dog is going to be an effective maneuver, but all that happens is that Makkachin abandons him for the warmth of Yuuri's arms. Which is disappointing, but also relatable.)

So when Viktor finds himself lurking in the bathroom in Hasetsu Ice Castle while Yuuri and Yurio are practicing, pinching his nipples to make them erect because he's tried literally everything else and also is kind of hungover, he is half-convinced the entire banquet was some kind of hallucination. What is he doing here?

Yuuri and Yurio are pretending to have not been practicing the quad salchow. Viktor puts on his skates, and the two of them stand before him, waiting for him to coach them. Neither of them look particularly pleased about it. Granted, Yurio never looks pleased about anything. But Yuuri could at least…

"Are you cold?" Yuuri blurts out, interrupting Viktor mid-sentence. His eyes flick down. He blushes. "You look...cold."

Viktor's wearing a near-transparent shirt and his nipples are so hard they're almost numb. But when that hint of pink spread across Yuuri's cheeks, he doesn't feel cold at all. He feels like every part of him that Yuuri looks at is burning.

Yuuri comes around on emotional closeness. And on physical closeness. And on Viktor himself.

Viktor still pinches his nipples every few hours, though. Just in case.

* * *

Yuuri does not have a nipple kink.

Until Viktor barreled into Hasetsu, Yuuri had never actually had to tell himself this. He'd just gone through life not really caring about nipples. He'd just gone through life without thinking of soft, puffy pink nipples, and how they got hard in the cold, and the texture, and the taste, and—

 _I'm not into it,_ Yuuri tells himself at the rink when Viktor's nipples are visible through his shirt. _I'm not,_ he tells himself when Viktor plays in the ocean with him and sweats drips down his chest suggestively. _I'm fine,_ he tells himself when Viktor stares at him under heavy eyelids, lying outside the inn, wilting in the summer heat, and Viktor's nipples are still hard.

"Is there nipple Viagra? Is that how he does it?" Yuuri asks one night after significantly more wine than he needs. "Like, what if he has an erection for too long? What if his nipples fall off? I don't want them to fall off. They're beautiful and I want to lick them."

"Please go to bed," Phichit tells him.

So anyways, Yuuri is completely fine and not sexually obsessed with Viktor's nipples. He does not think about how sensitive Viktor must be if the fabric of his thin shirts makes him hard, and he does not think about waking Viktor up by biting at his chest, and he does not drunkenly order nipple clamps and forget he ordered them (and then Viktor rushes into the room to see if Yuuri is okay, because Yuuri makes a wounded dinosaur noise when he opens the package.)

And after he's done being deeply embarrassed, Yuuri stuffs a pillow in his mouth and jerks off, a gleaming gold clamp on each nipple.

He is fine, even if Viktor has spontaneously caused him to develop a nipple kink. It's fine. It's not like this is first time Viktor has caused Yuuri to have an ill-timed and humiliating sexual revelation.

* * *

(See Yuuri Katsuki, age fourteen, sprinting into the bathroom so that Yuuko does not notice that Viktor's skating gave a boner.)

(See also Yuuri Katsuki, age nineteen, licking vodka off a classmate's ass because he's watched one too many of Viktor's alcohol commercials.)

(See also Yuuri Katsuki, age twenty three, realizing that's he's developed an unwelcome Pavlovian reaction to Viktor's thumb on his mouth.)

* * *

As the sun sets on their last day in Barcelona, Viktor finds himself in bedwith Yuuri.

After the competition was over, Viktor decided to surprise Yuuri with an extra day in Spain, with no one to bother them and an upgrade to a room with a king-size bed for them to share. The city seemed brighter, somehow, with Yuuri at his side; the winter air seemed warmed with the ring on his hand. Yuuri keeps smiling at nothing, like he's so filled with happiness he can't contain it.

They're lying there, side by side on the plush mattress, holding hands and scrolling their social media feeds, when Yuuri speaks.

"We're still engaged, right?"

"What do you mean, still? We were never _not_ engaged."

"Oh."

Viktor rolls over to kiss him. Yuuri turns his head to accept it, and then sighs heavily.

"Are you sure?" he asks.

"I'm sure. Though I wouldn't say no to a third proposal."

"Third?"

"Once at the airport. Once in Barcelona. I think I'm owed at least one more."

"Pretty sure most people only get one per marriage."

"I want to hear you say the words," Viktor says earnestly. "Please?"

Yuuri grins at him. "Hang on." He gets out of bed, jams on his glasses, and goes over to his suitcase. Yuuri's bag, until Viktor's, is a mess. Viktor is itching to organize it. Yuuri digs around in piles of messily folded clothing and plastic bags until he unearths what he's looking for: a small black velvet jeweler's box.

"Viktor Nikiforov," Yuuri says as he gets down on one knee next to Viktor's side of the bed. "Will you—"

"Yes!"

"Let me ask first!"

"Sorry," Viktor says, hand over his mouth. He feels giddy.

Yuuri clears his throat. "I love you," he says, and he holds out the box. "I love you so much, and I want to keep being with you. Will you marry me?"

"Yes!"

Viktor swings his legs over the side of the bed so that he can take the box from Yuuri's hands. _I thought the box Yuuri bought from Maria Dolores was blue,_ he thinks. Then again, it had been dark, and Viktor had soon after been extremely distracted.

"It's empty," Yuuri says, "but I figured you'd want to keep the ring on."

"You can pry it off my corpse when I die," Viktor agrees. He opens the empty box without really thinking.

It's not empty. And it doesn't contain rings. Instead, inside are two golden nipple clamps. With...feathers dangling from them. And tiny crystals.

"Ah," Viktor says.

"Fuck," Yuuri says. "Here, I—" he snatches the box and slams it shut, "pretend you didn't see that. That wasn't-I'm sorry, I fucked up the proposal—"

"Are those for me?"

"Sort of—"

"Because if you bought them for someone else after proposing to me—"

"I wasn't going to actually give them to you! And I definitely wasn't going to give them to you now!"

"First the eros of the katsudon, and now these instead of a ring, hm? You have a unique perspective on romance, Yuuri." Viktor reaches down and plucks the box out of Yuuri's hands. Yuuri stares at him like he's deciding whether to continue panicking, and then sighs and sits down on the bed beside him.

It strikes Viktor that they're both in a hotel room in their pajamas, and it's nine in the evening, and they ordered dessert for dinner because they were lazy, and Yuuri has proposed to him three times: once without the words or a ring, once with a ring and without the words, and now with the words and nipple clamps. Viktor covers his mouth with his hand. He snickers.

Yuuri looks at him-and then he giggles.

"Can you imagine," Viktor says, hand still over his mouth as he laughs, "if someone asked us how we got engaged-and we told them that you gave me a pair of nipple clamps instead of a ring—"

"Don't ever tell Chris this," Yuuri replies, between bouts of breathless laughter, "he'll give us shit forever about it—"

"He'd complain that you didn't invite him to go shopping with you to pick them out—"

"Yeah, that's exactly what we needed," Yuuri snorts, "for all three of us to go into a sex toy store in Barcelona before the GPF, that would have looked great on Instagram—"

"Would you have proposed to me in a sex toy shop with Chris?"

"I'd have proposed to you anywhere."

Viktor feels himself blush, all the way up to his ears. He touches his ring. It doesn't feel real to him, any of this. It doesn't seem possible, that someone could love him like this, that someone could be willing to have him like this-messy and imperfect. But here Yuuri is, watching him with wide dark eyes, turning his ring over and over on his finger. Yuuri is messy and imperfect, too; he packed nipple clamps for a figure skating competition and appears to have lost the box their engagement rings came in. Maybe that's why he can love Viktor the way he does. (Maybe he'll let Viktor take over the packing if they get married.)

"Do they hurt?"

"Yeah." Yuuri shrugs. "They're clamps."

Viktor tries one on the tip of his little finger. It stings; Yuuri's mouth drops open a little. The feathers dangle as the little crystals click together. He's surprised by how elaborate the clamps are. Is Yuuri experienced at this kind of thing, he wonders, or did he just assume that feathers and crystals were what Viktor would want? He's not wrong.

"I didn't know you were into this kind of thing."

"It's your fault."

"My fault!"

"Because your nipples have been erect since March!"

"Wait, it worked?" Viktor throws aside the clamps and throws himself onto Yuuri. Yuuri, because he is the best, puts his arms around Viktor without complaint. He smells like terrible hotel soap. Viktor can't believe him. "My nipple seduction tactic actually worked?"

Yuuri groans. Viktor can hear his exasperated expression.

"I'm not actually sure I want to know," he says.

"Nudity and sleeping didn't work, and Makkachin is a traitor," Viktor explains, in the hopes that if he is confusing enough Yuuri won't ask for clarification. Although Yuuri did propose to him three times, so clearly Viktor has been a master of seduction all along. He squeezes Yuuri hard. "And in books they're always pinching their cheeks, but obviously I don't want to look blotchy and—"

"Have you been randomly pinching your nipples this entire time."

"Not randomly. I had a timetable."

"Viktor," Yuuri says, as one of his hands wanders up Viktor's shirt, "if you don't stop trying to seduce me, you're going to kill me."

"Oh, no," Viktor says. Yuuri's mouth presses against the exposed skin of Viktor's shoulder where his shirts slipped down; his hand splays out across Viktor's chest. His palms are rough. The skin scrapes over Viktor's nipple. Viktor jumps. He hears Yuuri laugh, softly-and then then he does it again. "Yuuri."

"The one time you decide to wear clothes," Yuuri grumbles. Viktor laughs and helps Yuuri take off his shirt; he lets Yuuri shove him down on the bed; he drags a hand down his chest before pinching himself right there where Yuuri can see.

* * *

(See Viktor Nikiforov, age twenty seven, realizing that he's had a nipple kink all along.)

* * *

Yuuri's list of patented and highly effective Seduction Tactics (TM), designed by him especially to lure in one Viktor Nikiforov, are as follows:

1\. Love him the most

2\. Best Dog

3\. Skating

4\. Let him plan the wedding

5\. Nipples


End file.
